I'm back

I'm resolving to stop slacking off so much in the New Year, and both get back to daily posting and actually begin the currently stillborn Atlas Shrugged Project in proper. I like this little hobby and don't mean to drift from it, but it's been a busy season of ups and downs. Fortunately I have cobloggers, and Susan, to keep Megan from feeling too secure about herself in my absence. So let's do some shorters, see what I've missed. (Apologies ahead of time if I overlap prior coverage.)

Big Three get a deal to save the day --but not the year:

I will now attempt what I think is a fair rendition of Detroit's history over the last fifty years.

Oh, goody.

In the early 1950s, for various reasons Detroit developed a cozy three-way oligopoly. The UAW developed a cozy monopoly on supplying labor service to that oligopoly. In some ways, the UAW helped sustain that oligopoly. If you're a big company whose quality suffers, you have problems. But if you have a union making sure that labor quality cannot vary across the industry, you don't need to worry that your competitors will make a better car.

How the fuck is this woman employed? The UAW hurt the American auto industry by providing it with equal access to quality labor, according to Megan McArdle. What the fucking fuck of a fucked fucko fuckery fuckawoo fuckadoo?
She then accuses the unions of forcing the big three to make cheap, shoddy cars by... ummm.... vulcan mindmeld. Then the government forced the big three to make cars that explode, and so on. Now the only solution is for the union to actually pay the big three for the privilege of making cars for them, unless you want executives to live slightly less well or something barbaric.

Help us save our homes!:

Eventually so many homes will be foreclosed on that homelessness will be the norm and it won't be a problem anymore, so let's just wait for the market to sort it out.

Just say no to drug laws of all sorts:

Here we see Megan make the devil's advocate argument that maybe drug laws are justified as a secondary means to jail the really bad people who just happen to be overwhelmingly black or hispanic, and universally poor. If we're not going to let black men have jobs we might as well find some way to make them economically useful, right?

Kennedy yesterday! Kennedy today! Kennedy forever!:

I like getting self-righteous about nepotism and undeserved career advancement in political groups I oppose because I enjoy being a hypocrite.
Btw, I voted for George Bush, twice.

Riding to the rescue!:

Nor did anyone mention the seemingly even more obvious step of shutting off the water main for an hour, or at the very least, dropping sandbags over the break--though the Post claims crews found the water too turbulent to get to the valve.

Her official title includes the word "Editor".

Methinks the emergency responders may have had a lot of shiny new equipment, funded by the federal government's post-911 spending spree, that they wanted to try out. But maybe there was something I was missing.

Heh, indeed.

Are we targeting the symptom or the disease?:

Megan is a disease vector for the twin cancers of greed and stupidity that have undermined the world financial system. She will never take even a moment's responsibility for this, however, which means her work will only grow more infuriating in the months to come. This post is a good example.

You've heard me say here that many of FDR's schemes were lunatic and probably helped prolong the depression. (If you're a liberal, you have probably spent more than a little time in the comments screaming that I'm a heartless and innumerate fool who wouldn't know good economic policy if it bit me in the aggregate demand.)

Or maybe we're saying that you're a liar who consciously ignores reality in favor of comfortable lies and delusions. Either/or.

Thus, I naturally wonder if fighting to keep the housing market from falling might, like the NIRA, actually make things worse.

Trying to help people will just make things worse, guys. The fact that Megan has been wrong in every possible way up till now only means she's better positioned to fix things than, say, some Krugman guy who accurately predicted what's happening based on common sense and intelligence. Duh.

Madoff feeder fund: buyer beware:

If I cover a handful of the worst excesses of the criminal class responsible for the economic crises we face maybe I can distract from my cheerleading for the same folk the rest of the time.

Invidious comparisons, part II:

Megan has been concern trolling Obsidian Wings frequently of late, possibly because someone there made the mistake of trying to be polite to her, a depressing error to see them make.

Anyhow, Hilzoy said

* The financial executives helped cause the present meltdown. Auto workers did not.

* The financial executives run their firms, and are responsible for their troubles.

among other reasonable things, which Megan calls "bizarre", because she's an insane asshole enabler. So Megan invents a world where the 50,000 jobs being shed in the financial industry are all executive positions, and where the millions in ill gotten gains those few actual lords of the realm who lose jobs have to fall back on don't fully cushion their pride, meaning they're in just as bad a position as millions of potentially unemployed blue collar workers.
She tries to justify this, but I'm not going to read it. You shouldn't either.

I'll have a second round of shorters later tonight, but for now I need to calm down a bit. Ye gods, she's an asshole. At least someone like Dan Riehl knows he's a piece of shit, and goes with it. Megan wants to, and probably does, believe she's a decent person, at least at heart.